


Granddaughter

by SailorChibi



Series: aro-ace Valentine fics [6]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Aromantic, Aromantic Character, Aromantic Claire Novak, Asexual Character, Asexual Claire Novak, Asexuality, Castiel is Claire Novak's Father, Claire Novak in the Bunker, Claire tries hard to be understanding, Claire-centric, Daddy Castiel, Daddy Dean Winchester, Gen, Hugging, I love that those are both tags, M/M, Mary Winchester Feels, POV Claire Novak, Sassy Claire Novak, and mary is alive, aro-ace character, aromantic Claire, asexual Claire, basically all you need to know is that dean survived, claire novak feels, dean winchester and Castiel are claire novak's parents, grandmother mary winchester, mary winchester needs a hug, very minor season 12 spoilers, which I'm not sure how you could have missed at this point
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-02-15
Packaged: 2018-09-24 13:00:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9727907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SailorChibi/pseuds/SailorChibi
Summary: Life in the bunker is stressful, but it’s worth it for having a family that accepts you and all your weirdness. And while she’s happy for Dean and Sam, Claire’s just not sure how the appearance of Mary Winchester is gonna change things.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I never intended to write a sequel to the SPN aro-ace fic I wrote last year, but as soon as I saw Mary in season 12 I started wondering what it would be like if Claire was there when Mary turned up and this is the result. This is part of what's becoming my Valentine's tradition of writing aromantic (and sometimes asexual) fics. 
> 
> Note: someone who is aromantic does not feel romantic attraction towards anyone. Someone who is asexual does not feel sexual attraction towards anyone (some asexuals enjoy having sex and others don't - and those who don't may be sex-repulsed, which is what Claire is).

It’s cold and the sky is spitting and she’s too restless to actually sit in the car and wait, which means that she ends up spending way too long alternating between sitting on the hood of the car and pacing. No one’s answering her calls and the bunker is in lockdown and Castiel’s not answering her prayers and five hours ago she had to hug one of her father figures goodbye and Claire is _so over the world_ at this point.

When the lights of the Impala sweep over the trees, the black car coasting to a stop about ten feet away, she’s so frustrated she wants to cry. And then she actually does cry a little, because the front door of the Impala swings open and Dean climbs out. He looks pissed when he sees her, which is fair enough because yesterday Castiel took her to Jody’s and Claire was supposed to stay there until they came for her, but come on. She’s not five years old.

Or that’s what she tells herself anyway, but then she also literally throws herself into Dean’s arms and squeaks out “Papa” in this embarrassing little girl voice when he automatically hugs her back, so the jury might still be out on that.

“Claire?” he says. “What the hell are you doing here? You’re supposed to be at Jody’s!”

“Papa?” comes a second, unfamiliar voice right behind Dean’s. “You’re a _father_?”

Claire spares the woman exactly half a second before ignoring her completely. “You’re alive!” she says hoarsely. “I thought – Amara?”

“She had a change of heart,” Dean says, his hands tight on her shoulders, which means he’s missed her just as much as she missed him. “Honey, why are you here?”

“You expected me to stay away? You were as good as committing suicide!” Claire says hotly. “You didn’t think that Dad would need me after that?”

“I wasn’t –” Dean cuts himself off, sighing heavily. He rubs a hand over his face. Claire frowns at him and then looks over his shoulder at the woman, who’s hovering awkwardly at the fringe of their bubble. She’s got long blonde hair and she’d be pretty if she weren’t so obviously freezing – but wearing just a thin nightgown will do that to you in late March.

“Papa, who is that?” she asks. “And where’s Dad?” Fear coils low in her belly. The fear of losing the family she’s cobbled together for herself has been the worst part of moving to the bunker hands down. Every time Dean and Cas go out the door, she’s never sure if they’re coming back. This time, Dean flat-out told her he wasn’t. She fists her shaking hands in his leather jacket.

“Let’s get inside first,” Dean says.

“The bunker’s locked down.”

Dean’s mouth tips into a frown. He squeezes her hands and looks at the woman. “Mom, come on.”

Mom?

The word judders Claire’s world to a stop. She stares at the woman, suddenly realizing that she does look a little familiar. And that’s because Claire’s seen her before in the photographs on Dean’s dresser. There’s one picture in particular that’s Dean’s favorite, a photograph of a smiling women cuddling a puppy. It’s hard to reconcile that smiling woman with this person, but the similarities are too striking to ignore.

Dean starts moving and Claire follows automatically, too shocked to protest. He gets the bunker out of lockdown – apparently he and Sam have dealt with this before – and the woman (Mary?) follows them inside. She looks around the bunker with a faint expression of distaste, and the shock Claire feels is quickly replaced by a swell of anger because this her home and she’s _happy_ here, and no one has the right to look at it like that.

But then they figure out that Sam’s gone, and that’s all that Dean is focused on so Claire stops trying to get answers. She and Mary stand off to the side while Dean storms around the bunker right up until Cas appears. He’s not there one second and there the next. Mary grabs a gun. Claire just throws herself at him.

“Dad!” she cries, crashing into him with all the grace of a bag of bricks, but Cas catches her easily, of course. He’s surprised, but only to a certain degree: living with Claire and Dean, nothing really seems to surprise him anymore. He accepts her hug, tucking her into the curve of his body, and she feels so secure she could cry again.

She doesn’t. She has a reputation to maintain, after all.

“Cas –” Dean begins, charging into the room, then cuts to, “Whoa, hey! Mom, he’s a friend!”

Mary still has the gun on them, Claire realizes. No wonder Cas is holding onto her so tightly, one arm around her lower back and the other hand on her shoulder, ready to defend her or fly her to safety.

“He just appeared,” Mary says.

“He’s an angel. They do that. Cas, Sam is gone.”

Within the span of a six or seven hours, Claire is left alone in the bunker. Dean frets about leaving her and makes noises about Jody, but she’s a big girl and she’s been homeless and she tells him to his face that his options are the bunker or her coming. Not surprisingly, Dean opts for the bunker.

It always feel too large when she’s left alone here, but Claire deals. She cleans up the blood – and god, there’s a lot of it, too much, what if Sam is dead? – and then keeps to a routine as best she can. She gets periodic updates from Dean and Cas, mostly just one word texts to let her know they’re okay. She keeps her answers equally brief. They don’t need to be distracted right now.

Almost five days after they left, they come back with Sam in tow. Sam looks terrible in the way of someone who’s been through a lot of pain and has since been healed by angel mojo, but still isn’t wholly okay in the head. He’s moving very slowly as he gets out of the car. Claire goes up to him and stands there awkwardly because she doesn’t want to hurt him more, and he looks at her and smiles tiredly and puts a big hand on her head for a moment.

Since he’s been injured – tortured, Dean tells her later – she doesn’t yell at him for messing up her hair.

Cas spills the whole story as he knows it while Dean and Mary fuss over Sam. He takes Claire to the kitchen, but they both end up sitting at the table while they talk because they know what’s going to happen. Sure enough Dean blows in twenty minutes later and starts chopping vegetables in a frenzy, muttering something about soup for Sam. Mary follows more slowly, taking a seat across from Claire and looking at her like she’s a novelty.

“You’re… my granddaughter?” she asks hesitantly, which tells Claire that Mary has discovered what Dean’s one-track mind is like when Sam is missing and/or presumed hurt.

She exchanges a look with Cas, knowing that Dean has gone still at the counter, and opts for the simple answer. “Yeah, I guess.”

Because it’s not a lie, right? Cas and Dean are like her dads now, and they have been for about two years. She calls Cas ‘dad’ and Dean ‘pops’ or ‘papa’ depending on the day, and Dean kisses her on the head all the time and makes her breakfast and Cas hugs her and rubs her feet while they watch television together. Dean taught her how to shoot a gun for real and Cas taught her self-defense, and Dean tries to be the stern one but the puppy eyes always make him break and Cas just sighs and tries not to smile when they inevitably end up in trouble. 

Mary nods, her mouth gone pinched. “Where’s your mother?” she asks.

“Uh, Mom.” Dean spins around.

“She’s dead,” Claire says matter-of-factly. “So is my dad.”

“But I thought…” Mary looks confused.

“I’m adopted,” Claire tells her, but that’s as far as she gets. She’s forgiven Cas and she knows her parents are in heaven, but that makes it no easier to talk about. She gets up and walks out, trusting that Dean and Cas will tell Mary the whole sordid story.

She goes to check on Sam and finds him just getting out of the shower. He’s wound a towel around his waist and is staring at the pajama bottoms laid out on the bed like they’re going to bite him. And he’s not wounded that Claire can see, but he’s moving slow and exaggerated like he thinks he is. The way he takes each step, so hesitant, makes her wonder what happened to his feet.

He jumps when he finally notices her standing in the doorway and grabs at the towel around his waist. “Claire!”

“Oh relax,” she says. “I’ve walked in on Dad and Pops doing it. You don’t have anything I haven’t seen before, and it’s not like it’s gonna do anything for me.”

Sam’s face does something complicated. “I’m not sure what part of that to address first,” he mutters. 

“I do. We need to get those two a sock for the door.”

His smile is reluctant, but there all the same. “You still shouldn’t be in here. It’s inappropriate.”

“Dude, you’re like my uncle,” she tells him. “Even if I weren’t ace, it would still be gross.” And she loves it now how casually she can sling those words around, and no one under this roof ever flinches away from them or looks at her weirdly. 

Sam sighs loudly. “You’re so much like Dean sometimes it’s scary.”

“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment. Sit. I’ll help.” She points at the bed. Sam does sit, gingerly like he thinks it’ll hurt, and Claire grabs the pajamas and squats in front of him. She very carefully slides his feet through first one leg and then the other, and the smile of gratitude Sam’s giving her when she looks up makes her heart twist. She stands up and looks away while he does the rest himself.

“I thought you’d be with Dean,” he says.

“Mary asked where my mom was.”

“Ah. Claire…”

“It’s fine. She has the right to ask.” Claire’s looking at Sam’s nightstand. He has a picture there too, though it’s not the same as Dean’s: it’s Mary with a baby in her arms, presumably Sam himself. It’s easier to reconcile the woman in the kitchen with the woman in the photograph this time now that Mary doesn’t look so cold, so lost.

Sam’s hands brush her shoulders lightly, giving her the chance to step away, before he hugs her from behind. They stand there for a long moment, looking at the photograph together.

“Is it weird?” Claire hears herself ask. Her voice sounds weirdly thick.

“Yeah,” Sam mutters. “It’s weird.”

She’s expecting that and she appreciates the honesty. It’s not like she doesn’t want her parents back. They’re her mom and dad, of course she’d love to see them again. But she also has a new life now that she really likes, and she’s not sure how that would all fit together. Thinking that makes her feel guilty though, and she’s privately glad she’ll never have to deal with it.

“Maybe it’ll get better,” she offers.

“Maybe.”

“Sam?” Dean calls. “Claire?”

“In here,” Claire calls back.

Dean appears at the door a moment later, looking unsurprised to see them. “Got some soup in the works for you, Sammy. Think you can stomach some toast until it’s ready?”

“I’ll try,” Sam says, releasing Claire from the hug. She bumps their shoulders again and he grins at her, the first honest smile he’s given since he got back, and she can’t help the flicker of pride.

They eat dinner together at the table, the five of them, Claire sandwiched between her dads with Mary across from her between Sam and Dean. It’s a little awkward since no one mentions the elephant at the table, but Mary keeps watching Claire. She pretends not to notice, too involved in Dean’s story of God and Amara suddenly making up. It’s hands down the weirdest story she’s ever heard, and she can tell it still unsettles Dean.

So she’s not shocked when Cas and Dean disappear together after dinner, leaving the soup to simmer; their bedroom door closes behind them, and she figures they’re probably having ‘we’re both still alive so yay’ sex and is just grateful that this time they actually made it into the bedroom. Sam heads for bed too, though she gives it an hour at the most before he’ll reappear in the living room.

That leaves Mary and Claire and a noticeable tension. Claire sits on the couch with a can of coke, since Dean’s forbidding her from drinking until she hits twenty-one and she hasn’t seen fit to dodge around that rule yet when alcohol seems kind of gross, and Mary takes a seat beside her. Claire counts the minutes, then the seconds, until the moment when she knows Mary will break – 

“Cas told me what happened. He was very apologetic.”

Nailed it.

Claire takes a drink. “Yeah, he always is,” she says. At one time those words would’ve come out bitter, but right now they’re mostly fond. Cas is what he is, but that doesn’t stop him from apologizing for his mistakes. Some days it means more than others.

“I’m surprised,” Mary says slowly. “If a supernatural creature had killed my father…” She trails off, and Claire can hear the rest of that sentence: ‘I wouldn’t have moved in with that creature and his boyfriend and started calling them both my dads’.

“It didn’t happen overnight. I hated him for a long time,” Claire says. She can’t pinpoint the moment when that changed. “But Castiel and Dean love me.” She sounds defensive, even to her own ears, but it’s the truth and Claire knows that. Some nights it’s her only comfort.

“I could tell.”

Claire glances at her. Mary’s smiling.

“Dean talks about you the same way he talks about Sammy,” she continues. “Dean and Castiel… are they…”

“Yeah. Very much so.” Claire gives her a defiant look, because even though she could do with never walking on the two of them having sex ever again, it makes her happy to see the way they act like such a dorky couple. 

Mary just nods. “They seem good together. Very in sync.”

“It look a long time,” Claire says, softening a little. “A really long time.”

“I used to tell Dean that angels were watching over him. I didn’t mean it so literally,” Mary says.

The comment surprises Claire and she laughs a little. She hopes that Cas explains just what the rest of his family is like - dicks, massive dicks, to borrow Dean's favorite turn of phrase - before Mary encounters any more angels, because Claire doesn’t feel up to that night tonight. She just says, “Cas can be very literal sometimes” and leaves it at that.

Then Mary asks the inevitable question. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

Claire tries not to openly bristle, since it’s a question that everyone seems to ask eventually and Mary just got told she has a pseudo-granddaughter that she’s obviously trying to connect with. She says, “No, I don’t.”

“Oh.” Mary pauses, then asks cautiously, “A girlfriend?”

“No. I’m aromantic. Asexual.”

Those words clearly mean nothing to Mary. “Oh, okay.”

“The short explanation is that I’m not interested in sex or romance,” Claire says, watching her out of the corner of her eye. “With anyone.”

“I see.” Mary’s frowning now, lips pursed, trying to wrap her head around that. It’s usually a hard concept for people to grasp, and few people are as accepting as Cas and Dean were. She’s just _waiting_ for the usual stupidity (“you just haven’t met the right guy yet!” or “maybe you should get yourself checked out by the doctor” are the two she runs into most frequently) and she’s not even sure how she’s going to respond. She knows she needs to be polite if not gracious, but this is a hot-button topic.

So when the silence just drags on, Claire decides to be kind and breaks it. “I can give you the longer explanation later on, but I don’t want to overwhelm you,” she says. “This…” she waves a hand “must be a lot to take in.”

“It is,” Mary agrees. “I mean, even just Dean and Sam… it’s hard to look at them and see my babies.”

“They’re good people,” Claire says, glad for the change of subject.

“I know. I never doubted that,” Mary says with a tiny smile. “So tell me… what do you like to do for fun?”

Claire’s pretty sure she doesn’t mean the self-defense lessons or time spent perfecting her aim, so she opts to tell Mary about some of the shows she likes because that seems safer. That leads to her turning the television on. Mary is immediately fascinated with how far television has come, and Claire gladly surrenders the remote and settles back to watch Mary channel surf. She doesn’t remember falling asleep.

She wakes up to Cas lifting her off the couch in a bridal carry, his arms strong and warm. Claire briefly considers waking up fully to remind him that she’s not actually four years old, but this is the first good sleep she’s gotten in weeks and he smells like Dean’s aftershave and she’s comfortable, so she lets it go this one time. Then Dean crowds in close to kiss her on the top of her head, and she sleepily calls them both dorks and lets the sound of Dean’s low chuckle carry her back to sleep in Cas’s arms. 

Mary hangs back for the next two days, just watching all of them like she’s been sent to observe a foreign culture, and really Claire thinks that’s not too far off base. It’s painful to watch how hard Dean and Sam attempt to include her while trying not to push too hard. Claire kind of wants to put them both out of their misery and tell them to back off, but that’s not her place. She just leans against Cas, smug for the way that angel hardness goes human soft in the places where they touch, and is terribly, deeply glad she knows her place now.

On the third morning, she shuffles into the living room to find Mary watching television again. It’s obvious she’s been up all night from the shadows under her eyes. Claire hesitates, unsure if she’s welcome, but Mary doesn’t even look at her.

But then, just as Claire is considering ducking back out, Mary does say, “I feel like I don’t belong here.”

“Well, technically you don’t,” Claire says awkwardly.

“Dean and Sam want me to.”

Claire is not equipped for this at 7am. “Do you want to?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Don’t leave them,” Claire says, surprising herself. “I mean, not for good. Don’t like… kill yourself or anything.”

“The thought crossed my mind,” Mary says, because she’s a frighteningly direct person. “But no. I’ve been given a second chance, I think. I’m just not sure what to do with it. The world is such a different place and I’m not sure what that means for me yet.”

“You have time to figure it out,” Claire points out.

Mary does look at her then, but Sam walks in before she can say anything and the conversation is dropped. Still. Claire is very much not surprised when Mary takes off two weeks later. Sam tries to pretend he understands and Dean is just shattered and Cas, like Claire, has seen this coming from way off, so he just squeezes Claire’s shoulder and then goes to put Dean back together as best he can. 

That night, Claire gets a text from an unknown number.

UNKNOWN: I looked up sexuality last night.

Claire’s eyebrows shoot up. That can only be one person.

CLAIRE: And?

UNKNOWN: you’re a good person too, Claire.

For some reason, that makes a lump form in Claire’s throat. She knows that Mary is still in culture shock, that aro and ace are still foreign concepts to her and are probably so far down the list of importance that Mary might never have time to come around to grasping what they really mean, but she still tried. 

CLAIRE: thanx. Pops and Uncle Sam miss you.

Then she chews on her thumbnail because yeah, that probably wasn’t the smartest text to send when Mary left because she needed some space. But then she gets back:

UNKNOWN: I love all of you. 

And she has to smile, because she knows that means Mary will be back. It might be a while, and it’ll be hard in the meantime, but at some point they’ll be together again. Claire can wait; she’s gotten good at that. She taps out a quick answer, saves the number into her contacts under the nickname “Gram”, and goes to see what her dads and her uncle are making for dinner.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr](http://tsuki-chibi.tumblr.com/).


End file.
